(A/N: Much credit here goes to director Wim Wenders for his beautiful film, "Wings of Desire," Vincent Ward's film "What Dreams May Come," and to C.S. Lewis for his after-life allegory, "The Great Divorce." The angels Gabriela and Damael first appear in "The Man in the Boat.")
Chapter One: The Dying Swan
Forty-nine years after the great fire of 1871, a cold wind whips around the outside of the Opera Populaire, its vast stone edifice now shuttered and littered with debris. In late 1872 it was rebuilt and rebounded somewhat, until the Great War. Now it remains a decrepit hulk, empty and neglected, awaiting the day of the auction and its final demolition.
"He's sleeping," says the Moroccan manservant Yasim, as he carefully arranges the covers around the quiet form of a very old man lying motionless in the bed. When Yasim leaves the room, an old woman pulls the neatly arranged covers back, takes off her wrap, and slips into bed with him. He is blind, and his hands reach out to find her face. "Meg," he breathes into her neck.
The old man still has the strength to roll over, and so he rests his face against Meg's breast, his chest against her belly, but his great heart is no longer strong and steady in the collapse of his chest. It flutters like a bird in a cage, waiting for the day when the door will open and it will fly loose and free into the blue, to where she cannot tell and where she cannot follow.
Meg strokes his face and remarks to herself that nature's humor consists mostly of bitter irony. In the general ruin of age it is impossible to tell that the man lying next to her, who fifty years ago men feared as the "Phantom of the Opera," ever had any facial blight or deformity at all.
Her own face is lined and worn too, although her dancer's body has carried her well through sixty-six years. Of the man's beauty, though, there is almost no remnant, unless it be in the strong line of his jaw covered with pouched flesh. Underneath, the line is still beautiful, still discernible after all his eighty-two years.
They kiss gently and then he asks in a papery whisper, "Is everything ready?" It is, it has been ever since the auction was announced some weeks earlier. Meg looks him over carefully as she always does before leaving the house, because it is perhaps the last time she will see his face, so beloved to her.
Yasim and his brother Ahmed drive her to the cemetery. There she finds a small tombstone not so elaborate as the others, but it's understandable, as the stone was erected during the Great War when everyone suffered such terrible privations.
Meg places on the side of her gravestone a single red rose. A black velvet ribbon fixes to it a blue-stoned ring. This is what her husband has asked her to do. She knows the ring well - it is the very one he ripped off a slender white neck during the Bal Masque on New Year's Eve, in the foyer of the Opera Populaire.
It is Christine de Chagny's tomb which her dying husband has asked her to visit.
Meg places her burden down on the cold stone, and a great burden it has been. She has reproached him only once for keeping it, and thereafter held her peace. Considerately he has hid it out of her sight, but the bitter taste has persisted all these years.
Her husband's instructions are strange. She is to place the ring on the gravesite, and Ahmed will guard it. Then she is to go to the auction and bet on a music box, the little Persian monkey one with the clapping cymbals. She is not to win it, however. About this he is most adamant. So Ahmed positions himself behind a large Grecian tomb as Meg climbs into the carriage.
She doesn't understand this plan which he conceived on the very day he heard of the auction. As death comes closer to him, she can't follow him, can't follow what he knows, or how he knows it. It's as if a veil has come off between him and some other woman, as if one of those great twisting statues at the Opera Populaire has suddenly taken the covering off her face and taught him a tune which no one else can hear.
Yasim drops Meg off at the Plaza for the auction, and her heart almost stops in her breast when Raoul de Chagny arrives. Crippled and shaking, he is carried by his servants into the ruined Opera. He does not speak, but his shocked look suggests to Meg that he has momentarily mistaken her for her mother. His watery, unfocused eyes keep returning to her, and when the auctioneer addresses Meg by her professional name of "Madame Giry," he peers over at Meg as if the ghost of old Mme. Giry herself had appeared to carry him back all those years, to snap him across the back of the hand with her stick.
The Vicomte wants the music box and Meg lets him outbid her. He holds it tight to his chest like a child at Christmas who has finally obtained the toy he had been longing for the entire year. She follows him out onto the Plaza, and in a flash of light knows where he is going, what he plans to do with that music box, and what her husband already knows.
Raoul nods to her as he leaves, and she briefly nods back. His befuddled look tells Meg that he is probably somewhat senile and still confuses her with her mother even in the harsh winter light. A mix of gratitude and pity washes over her: pity because his life has been bitter, as the girl he risked so much for turned sad and pallid, whose children fled their cold home as soon as they could. And gratitude, because without Raoul de Chagny's intervention, Meg's husband would not lie in her arms every night, her hand under his neck.
Errand completed, Meg returns home and sits down by the bed, as she has for the past five years of his long illness. He asks how it went, as if he even needs to. She kisses his sightless eyes and feels his heart through the nightshirt, and its wild irregular flutter fills her with anxiety. He knows every flick of her every muscle. Gently he strokes her face and consolingly whispers as if she herself were the child, or the old man needing comfort in his last days.
There comes a knock and Ahmed enters. He places on the bedside table the very music box upon which Meg had bid earlier in the day. The old man raises himself a little - what effort that requires! and says to Ahmed, "The ring is gone?"
"Yes, the Vicomte took it as you said he would," Ahmed replies, and winds up the music box before slipping out of the room.
As the little tune plays, the old man's sightless eyes fill with tears. Meg places the music box on the bed between them until his recollecting hand reaches out to feel it and play over it. This small effort exhausts him, so he rests his white head back on the pillow.
Meg straightens the room and draws the worn curtains against the afternoon sun, but he protests. He wants to feel the warmth as it plays across his face. Then he calls to her, "Come lie with me," so at once she turns around, and in a moment she's stripped down to her chemise and crept into his arms with his head nestled into her neck, his hands on her breasts.
He's wet himself a little, but she doesn't care. Yasim can change the sheets later. For now, it matters not. Tears, semen, water, blood, anything from him she will take, because when she looks at his drawn face, whiter and looser than ever, she knows that too soon the time will come when the dust that's left of him will make no more wetness of any kind.
A little light plays around him, perhaps from the afternoon sun going behind the building across the street. Then she is not so sure from whence that light comes, for the music box behind her on the table starts to play, but more softly and slowly than it should. He struggles for breath and she clings to him, her face wet with tears, her chemise wet with his sweat. He has made a little water too, but it's as harmless and innocuous as that of a child, the child Meg has never borne him, and that old sorrow rises up once more and she sobs.
He holds her, stroking her through her quiet cries, like she held onto him seven times seven years ago. She says to him, "Tell me that you love me," and then her great and beautiful trumpeter swan gives back to her his own strong swan's cry, "Yes," and then he falls very quiet. After awhile he lies trembling in her arms, unconscious.
Then the music stops.
She doesn't move, or call out for Yasim, or send for the doctor. Gradually the light fades as the life slips out of him, as the great bird of his heart gives up the struggle in the cage of his chest. Then that great cage opens and he is set free forever, to fly where she cannot follow until the day she soars through the sky of her own death. He has flown, soaring up into a blue where there are no shadows, no veils, no masks, and no tears to fall behind them.
(continued...)